A school of 210 students defeated a school of 1,900 on Thursday, as the Laguna Blanca girls soccer team posted a 3-1 win over visiting Mountain View in the first round of the CIF playoffs.
Becca Braly, McKenzie Scarborough and Lauren McCallister each scored for the Owls, who have never made it past the second round of CIF competition.
Coach Gregg Luna was of course happy to get the win, but he also felt that his team is capable of playing much better.
“It wasn’t that I wasn’t pleased, it’s just that I thought the level of competition was a little bit below us, and instead of putting our style into play we went down a level,” he said. “We didn’t pass well, we weren’t talking and we just got into this desperate mode. But being tied 1-1 at halftime woke us up.
“We’re a good team, and I think we’re capable of making a deep playoff run.”
Braly, a freshman, scored early in the first to put Laguna up 1-0, but Mountain View tied it up about 10 minutes before the halftime whistle. Scarborough, another freshman, kept making strong runs down the right side of the field and was taken down hard in the box in the 51st minute, resulting in a penalty kick.
“I tried to calm down a little bit,” she said. “It was kind of hard knowing that if I made it would have been the go-ahead goal, but I just focused on trying to put it in the corner and it went in.”
McCallister scored on a beautiful left-footed shot from the top corner of the box that looped over the keeper’s head for the third and final Laguna goal.
The Owls, considered to be the best team in school history based on a 7-0-1 campaign in the Condor league, will continue their quest on Tuesday, with the venue to be determined by coin-flip.
